Monday, February 25, 2013

**** First of all, no one that reads this is allowed to show my mom. I made it so she (and my dad) can't see it on Facebook. She's in Florida, and it was work for my dad to get her to go. She's always worried that bad things will happen while she is gone, and she won't be around to help. She doesn't need to read this while she's there, okay? She knows we were in an accident, but she doesn't need details or pictures. If you promise, imagine signing your name on the line and read on. :)

I don’t usually write this kind of thing on Facebook (or a
blog). In some ways, this feels like
writing about a death in the family or about some big ol’argument Keith and I were in. Like Facebook isn’t the place to
share, and yet…

You've read about Soren’s "non-itchy butt" and Zeke’s latest
costume, because those things are what make me laugh. Those things are what make me smile when life
is stupid.

Those are some of the things
that make me be glad to be alive.

But
this day; today’s moments, made me happy to be alive too.

Not because it was so funny or fun, but
because it was one more time when I walked away glad that I (and my family)
were alive today.

I pray a prayer with
Soren every night (yes, it’s a different prayer than the one I do with Eyann,
because Soren likes to have “his own” prayer), and it says, at the end, “Thank
you for today, and we thank you for the day we’ll get to live tomorrow”.

I guess we assume we’ll get to live tomorrow, and usually we
do, but some day, that tomorrow will get cut short. Today’s events helped me to be thankful that
today wasn’t the day that got cut short.

This is going to be kind of long, because I want you to be
able to see, if you can, what it felt like, and I guess I need a lot of words to
do that...

We were on the expressway, going about 70 mph, when Keith put
on his brakes.

The right lane, the one we were in, was backed-up and going about
35 mph. We slowed and got in line with the
rest of the right-lane traffic.

I remember Keith being surprised by the sudden slow-down
while I, a habit after quick stops, looked in the rearview mirror to see a
black SUV speeding towards us.

Then we were in the Gravitron…

that carnival ride that pins you against the wall with its
fast spinning motion.

and I remember wishing it would stop so I could see what was
happening.

It did stop, eventually, and I quickly looked over at
Keith.

And Keith wasn’t looking back. Actually, he wasn’t responding at all. He was sitting in his seat, eyes open, but
not moving or talking. Not blinking or
answering when I called his name. I
didn’t want to scream it, because I didn’t want to upset the kids.

I wondered how I would tell the kids, (later, of course)
that their dad had died.

I crawled back to check on the kids. They were quiet, their heads probably still spinning; telling me about this leg that hurt or this part of their back was sore.

I checked on Keith again, getting in his face and calling
his name a little more loudly.

Nothing.

As I sat there,
trying to think of what to do next, Soren started crying…

“Mom, I can’t move my legs!”

Expecting the worst, I looked back to see his and Eyann’s
legs had been pinned between the seats, which had all been shoved forward on
impact.

I couldn’t get them out.

I checked on Keith again, calling his name, my face in his….then
finally….

“What??!!” (like I had rudely interrupted his sleep).

I had time, now, to notice the pieces of glass and chunks of
van that were shattered all over the floor and seats. Papers, books, water bottles, all of the
contents of my purse, and the kids’ DVDs were strewn all over the place. Basil was frantically collecting the Harry
Potter book that his Papa reads to them every night.

A women came to the door, to ask how she could help. (I love her, and I wish I knew who she was so
I could thank her). She helped me pull
my seat upright again, (it had been shoved flat back upon impact), and we loosened
the little kids’ feet. I shoved Soren
out of the only door that was not smashed shut, and this lady held him while I
tried to talk to Keith.

Keith was still in and out of consciousness.

When he was awake, he’d ask the same two questions: “What
happened?” and “Was it my fault?” (He
said later he felt bad that he wasn’t asking about the kids, but at the time,
he didn’t know he had any kids! He didn’t
know that it was his wife that kept
insisting he answer her questions.)

And so it was, for the next however-long (accident time must
be screwed up, because what felt like five minutes was around an hour), Keith
asked, over and over again, “What happened?” and “Was it my fault?”

In between answering his questions, (and
wondering how I was going to take care of him for the rest of his life, plus
all five kids), I held onto Eyann and Soren (who had asked to be put back in
the van with his family), and waited for the ambulance to come.

Three ambulances.

Four kids (not Soren) and Keith all strapped
to boards and raced to the hospital.

And this is where the story gets shorter, because while we
got whacked from behind full-force by an SUV and then thrown into traffic and
whacked again on Keith’s side, I walked into the hospital on my own, and my
kids were all released less than an hour after we arrived. Not a single scratch or bruise to be
found. On anyone.

Keith asked, for another five hours or so, if he had kids
and what their names were, if he had a wife, what happened and was it his
fault, where was he and who the hell were all of these people staring at him :) , what happened
(another 50 times), and what month and year it was. (That last question apparently, was one that
a nurse had asked him in her evaluation, and he tried “cheating” by asking me.) :)

Keith’s CT-scans finally came back normal, he eventually
figured out who his family was, and he even greeted Eyann in Chinese. I was glad I wasn’t going to have to change
his diapers in the very-near future.

We went to see the van the next day, and it was worse than I remembered (and worse than these pictures can visually describe). Keith’s seat was ripped out of its frame. Soren and Eyann’s (middle) seat was bent. The trunk was gone, pushed clear up to the rear seat. The rear seat was lop-sided and bent; shoved flat up to the seat in front of it. I kept mentally measuring how many inches were in between the sharp pieces of the very-crushed van and our kids’ fragile heads. I took note of the three broken back windows and the fact that not a single kid had even shed a drop of blood. I noticed the metal that was peeled back around the tires and the dent along most of the left side.

And that feeling I get when Soren tells me he likes my “wrinkly tummy”?
Or when my boys pretend they are Super Ninjas while "stealthing" around the house?
Or when Eyann and Sep try to make cookies together and make a giant mess?
Or when Keith sits on the couch, every single night, with our kids to read them Harry Potter?

Well, I kinda got that same crazy feeling while looking at that van. Like, “Hey God? I’m glad you gave me these people. And thanks for today. And thanks if we get to live tomorrow.”

How the heck did all of those windows (under the blue) shatter everywhere inside the van but not at all cut our kids??

That's our trunk, pushed all the way up to the rear seats.

These seats were pushed all the way to the next row of seats, leaving no room for legs at all. Good thing my kids are skinny??

An SUV (and all of that sharp stuff) was inches away from our kids' heads

Thursday, February 21, 2013

I haven’t written for awhile. Part of that is that I am back home to
laundry and cooking my own meals and work and cleaning and homeschooling. But the other part of it is that Eyann’s
place in our family doesn’t seem that mentionable anymore. I mean that in a good way….in a “She doesn’t
stick out so much; she blends” sort of way.

Some day, though, I will want to remember what she was doing
two months after she joined our family, and so I’ll write today.

Let’s start from 8 am.
At exactly 8 ‘o’ clock, the girl comes blasting (never quietly) into our
room and yells, “Goodah Moorahningah!”
Then, she usually jumps on us and laughs. Loudly.
She has been known to put her lips over my ear as she greets us in the (very early, for me) morning.

The girl then runs to the kitchen to request a banana. (The requests for bananas persist every hour,
almost all day long.) She says, religiously, to September,
“Time for school?” when she is done eating, and the two of them head
downstairs. This girl recognizes at
least 10 letters, she’s learning to write her name, she can count to 15, and
she knows her shapes (most of the time).
I can’t take credit for any of that.
S has been annoyed that the “little kids” don’t do school as much as she
does, and she has taken responsibility for getting all of Eyann’s school hours
in.

People have asked about her language. We have stayed in contact with one of Eyann’s
friends who was adopted on the same day to a family in Iowa. Her parents have told us that their daughter refuses
to speak Mandarin; even with a Chinese exchange student that had come to
visit. Keith and I laughed, saying that
Eyann is wondering why it is taking SO long for us to learn her language. She’s probably thinking, “Man, how do they
only know a handful of Chinese words!?
It’s been a couple of months!”
This girl still spouts out whole paragraphs in Mandarin and then stomps
her foot and scowls when we tell her we have no idea what she’s saying. The kids, on the other hand, have resorted to
speaking Chinese to her. Soren has taken
advantage of all of Eyann’s “bug words”: He will go into her room, grab one of
her “prize possessions”, and then wave it around in front of her, saying,
“Soren dah” (which, as far as we can tell,
means, “This is mine.”) He has
also picked up what we like to call Eyann’s “Chinese swear words”. When she is mad, she has a handful of
comments that she uses, and while we know they are not kind, we’re not sure
what they mean. When Soren and Eyann are
fighting, he will mutter under his breath, “Liggatoot!” or “Toyette
Eyann!” When Eyann is mad at him, he
will run into our room and cry, “Mom, Eyann just said Liggaseppy!” And I have to remind him that we don’t know
what it means, and maybe it is nice, and he is too smart to believe that,
because she always says it with a stamp of her foot and a shake of her little
big-haired head.

Which brings us to the next point. The girl, for an Asian, has big hair. Maybe this is one of my uneducated and
wrongly held assumptions, but I always thought Chinese people had beautiful,
straight, shiny, black hair. This
kid? She’s got big hair. And it’s not straight. It’s coarse and pretty unmanageable. We’re still working on what it looks like to
make it look cute. Maybe by the time she
cares, like when she’s a teenager, I’ll have figured out all the tricks for
her. A friend of mine laughed at me when
I had a haircut scheduled before I had thought about a pediatric visit. But hey!
A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, right? S is growing out her hair now, so the two of
them can have matching hairdos. Eyann
always makes sure to tell S that she looks “prelly!” She’s nice like that. She is constantly telling her siblings that
they are her buddies and that they are cute and that she loves them.

She’s really, really sensitive to our family and their
feelings. Keith, who says that sharing
who he is in public, as a pastor, gets him unusually emotional, sometimes cries
while he is speaking at church. Two
times now, Eyann has been upstairs to see this, and both times, tears start
welling up in her eyes. Soren gets hurt
more than any kid I know.
Constantly. Without ceasing. (If I prayed as much as he got hurt, I’d be a
freaking saint.) So, he also cries. A lot.
Eyann doesn’t understand why I don’t often run to his aid. But really?
I’d be running to the kid every five minutes. I tend to ignore him unless his cries sound
different than the “I am annoyed that I ran into the wall again” cries I
usually hear. Eyann doesn’t think this
is acceptable. She often drags me to her
brother, hugging him and saying, loudly, “YOU OKAY?” over and over again,
hoping I learn from her example and, through time, figure out what it looks
like to be a “good mom”. :) Apparently, September was crying in her sleep about some dog that died or
something, and she didn’t wake up because she was crying, she woke up because
Eyann was repeating, over and over, “YOU OKAY, SEPPY? YOU OKAY?” with her cute little not-quiet voice.

We like this girl.
She is good for our family. We
hope we are good for her. Every night,
she makes Keith and I pray for her, and this is the prayer she models for us to say: “Jesus, thank you for Eyann. We love her so much….” and every night, when
she reminds us to pray, I really mean that prayer. A lot.

Jesus, thank you for Eyann.
We love her so much. Thanks that
she gets to be in our family and that we get to be a part of hers. We pray we are as much of a gift to her as
she is to us. In Jesus’ name, (and then yelling
as loud as you can) AMEN!